Why B2B Sales Are More Complex Than Ever
The burden on sales operations is huge – the market continues to evolve, but the pressures to deliver on revenue and profit remains.
For sales, sales ops, and rev ops leaders, that means navigating the ups and downs of the market and competition, while having a growing number of channels to serve, including your own sellers, resellers and partners. Your customers are expecting B2C buying experiences even in the world of B2B manufacturing and distribution.
And most of all – to win deals – to get the best quotes out, with the right price and products – sales needs to wade through internal approvals, price lists, and either too much or too little data.
At the root of many sales challenges is a broken pricing process. For many B2B companies, pricing is fractured and siloed across multiple systems or spreadsheets. Without a central source of pricing truth, there’s a lack of control and flexibility to manage pricing and efficiently deliver that pricing to sellers.
Here are some major pain points for today’s sales teams that stem from problematic pricing:
- Slow Time-to-Quote Leads to Lost Deals: The first to submit a market-priced quote tends to win the deal, but with long approval workflows and inaccurate quotes, deals are lost to your competitors.
- Margin Leakage from Inconsistent Pricing: Whether it is complex configurations that are error-prone, over discounting, pricing based on stale costs, or lack of pricing transparency, it all adds up.
- Poor Customer Experience Across Channels: Even in manufacturing, customers are looking for B2C buying experiences in a B2B environment. Without a frictionless, ecommerce-driven buying experience, customers will turn to other suppliers.
- Lack of Pricing Intelligence for Sellers: It’s easy to leave money on the table when sellers are dealing with information overload and can’t operationalize customer-specific insights fast enough. Valuable data is locked in ERPs while sales works predominately in your CRM.
Effective selling is challenging because operations is struggling to balance multiple channels with little transparency into what each channel is doing. There aren’t enough guardrails to help guide sellers or create seamless self-service portals for customers. On the back end, sellers are slowed down by spreadsheets and manual processes and layers of approvals that lead to long turnaround times. Scaling the business becomes impossible, and there’s very little real-time transparency into margins or profitability.
Why Sales Technology Investments Often Fall Short
Businesses are spending millions of dollars on CPQ projects - they must consider costs not only of the software itself, but also the costs for integrations, change management, and ongoing maintenance and updates.
At the end of the day, businesses won’t be able to overcome some of these hurdles because of the disconnect with pricing data. If your CPQ selection doesn’t include accurate pricing with the right guardrails in place, your sales team will still be handcuffed.
Without the intelligence to know what sales actions and opportunities to take, sales is at a significant disadvantage when it comes to growing market share.
Why Connecting Sales and Pricing Is Critical for Revenue Growth
“When there’s a business problem – say too much inventory becoming distressed and getting written off – the common reflex is to throw more spreadsheets at it. But the reality is that manual tools create bottlenecks when it comes to getting sellers what they need to successfully execute deals.” said Rob Pedigo, senior director of pricing strategy at Dawn Foods. “When you connect your sales process with pricing, you can accelerate revenue growth by empowering sales teams to confidently close deals and quickly deliver quotes with the right price strategies and sales motions.”
By effectively managing the entire pricing lifecycle, finance and sales leaders can ensure the right price and intelligence is delivered to sellers where and when they need it the most.
Pricing does not stop at finance. While finance can manage and optimize pricing, it is up to sales and revenue operations leaders to deliver that data to sellers, resellers, and customers, influencing sales decisions across the business while keeping a pulse on revenue metrics. The key is to connect finance and pricing and leverage capabilities that are agile enough for the manufacturing and distribution space.
The ideal solution for sales is purpose-built for the industry and unites finance and sales data to eliminate silos. With the right pricing and sales acceleration tools, companies reap the benefits. Sales leaders can better collaborate with pricing counterparts while ensuring the right price reaches the right customer at the right time with the confidence and transparency needed to win the deal.
Benefits of Integrating Pricing and Sales Intelligence:
- Seamless configuration and quoting of complex products and services
- Full pricing transparency
- Data intelligence that enables sellers to close deals faster
- Seamless approvals, where finance doesn’t slow down sales cycles
- More time for sales reps to focus on what they do best: sell
Achieving these outcomes requires more than spreadsheets or static tools. Modern pricing solutions are essential to manage the entire pricing lifecycle, automating and optimizing operations while delivering real-time intelligence to sellers and customers. With the right platform, businesses can scale revenue growth with agility and confidence.
This is part of a series on the Pricing Lifecycle. Read our previous blog posts to learn what the pricing lifecycle is, discover the 10 most common signs of a broken pricing process, why pricing is more important than ever, and five challenges pricing leaders cannot ignore.
